ottimizza le prestazioni del tuo PC


Net.Medic è un programma cosiddetto Browser Companion. Lavora come monitor di sistema, per la connessione Internet, Intranet ed è in grado di analizzare le performance dell'hardware (CPU e Modem) per isolare e diagnosticare problemi di configurazione e di velocità.

Net.Medic lascia all'utente la possibilità di individuare eventuali colli di bottiglia e risolvere i problemi relativi, siano essi causati dall'Intranet, dal proprio PC, da Internet, dal Modem, dall'ISP, dal backbone.

Net.Medic identifica i problemi in pochi secondi ed offre suggerimenti per risolverli. In alcuni casi, addirittura, li risolve esso stesso. Net.Medic è inoltre una potente sentinella sul Vs. desktop. E' in grado di mantenere la memoria dei server più ... lenti .



Optimizing Internet Performance

Restoring the User's Faith in the Internet
The Explosion in Internet Performance Issues

As has been well-documented in the past few months, the Internet is plagued by a number of performance problems, creating the impression that the Internet is slowing to a crawl. While industry gurus may understand the underlying causes of these problems, the typical Internet user does not. The result is a growing frustration on the user's part as well as a proliferation of fingerpointing among the various Internet service and component providers.

The slow crawl of information, exacerbated by rapid growth in daily traffic on the Internet, can be attributed to a number of problems, including:
  • Misconfigured desktops or modems
  • Bandwidth bottlenecks
  • Page transfers that are "hung"
  • Insufficient access to ISP
  • Poor phone lines causing modem hangs or sub-par modem throughput
  • Congestion on the backbone
  • Server sluggishness
  • Server oversubscription
To users of the Internet and corporate intranets today, all of these problems produce the same effect: a Web page that takes forever to download or a cryptic error message of little value to the individual unfamiliar with HTTP.

More importantly, users are at a loss to understand the appropriate corrective measure. Should they buy faster modems? Not if the problem is an insufficient modem bank at the ISP. Switch ISPs? Not if the ISP is not the bottleneck. What about when the page transmission is hung? Waiting longer won't help, but if the user doesn't know that the cause is a hung connection, the result is an interminable wait. The frustrating news, from the user's perspective, is that while these problems have solutions, the user doesn't know how to implement these solutions. Unfortunately, most of the predictions and proposed solutions deal only with the issue of bandwidth and congestion on the Internet itself, leaving the user powerless to improve his Internet performance.

Available bandwidth (and congestion), however, is just one determinant of the user's online experience, and often not the most important one. If a modem connection is slow or if the Web servers are unresponsive, the perceived value of the Internet diminishes. Users need a tool for proactively monitoring and managing their online experience so that they receive the value they are seeking and paying for. They also need a mechanism for speeding up their data transfer rate by optimizing the individual components along their personal route defined as the dialogue between the user, the transmission through his unique pathway to the Web site, and back from the Web site server. More importantly, users need a way to optimize the interaction between the components including the CPU, modem, TCP/IP stack, ISP connection, and Web site.

Personal route through Internet


A further source of frustration to Internet users is that, given the organic and loosely organized nature of the Internet, users don't know whom to call or blame in the event of a problem. Their entire experience is reduced to the limited performance of the weakest link in their personal route through the Internet. If users could isolate the source of their problems and hold the responsible parties accountable, market forces would emerge more easily, with high-quality providers winning over more customers and thriving in this growing market. The result would be a more productive and enjoyable experience for the user as well as a smoother-running, more responsive Internet one which enables conversations, commerce, and community.

The Solution

VitalSigns Software, Inc. is committed to enabling users to get the most out of the Internet. VitalSigns has leveraged its employees' and advisors' years of industry and academic research to create Internet performance optimizers. Our mission is to:
  • Improve the individual's online experience
  • Accelerate the adoption of the Internet as a viable commerce and communications medium through tangible accountability and performance metrics
  • Improve relationships between users and their service providers
  • Provide fact-based end-to-end service monitoring
  • Isolate performance problems
  • Provide actionable information to enable users to make informed decisions


VitalSigns has created an easy-to-use, inexpensive, and powerful set of tools that empower all constituents of the Internet and Intranets, including users, service providers, equipment vendors, and managers.

VitalSigns Software's first product is an Internet browser companion, called Net.Medic, designed precisely to speed up and optimize the Internet user's online experience and the Intranet user's IT experience. The companion works alongside the user's browser of choice and dynamically tunes the end-to-end performance, depending on the type of problem encountered from the user's unique vantage point. It also keeps a log of information regarding problems encountered that could benefit from a long-term change, such as a modem upgrade.

The result? A faster, more rewarding online experienceone where users can focus on their destination instead of the road that got them there.

Unmet Needs

Providing a rewarding online experience requires that several user needs, currently unmet, be fulfilled. These user needs include increasing perceived speed, monitoring and improving performance, and isolating problems to allow the responsible party to take corrective action.

The Need for Speed

What Internet users crave, above all, is increased responsiveness or, in another word, speed. A recent survey by Georgia Tech Universityi shows that speed is the number one concern of Web users.

Typically, in a user's personal route there are numerous autonomous components and service providers whose performance can affect the speed of transmission to that user. These can include the computer, the browser and operating system, the modem, the ISP, the Internet backbone, and the Web site server and software. The common denominator between all of these parties is that they all rely upon a single protocol, or language, known as TCP/IP—the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol—whose use has been in existence for decades.

VitalSigns has developed numerous optimizations that can be made right at the desktop—including optimizations for the TCP/IP transmission, the modem, and the desktop hardware—that in combination can typically boost performance by 50%, sometimes by significantly more than that. VitalSigns has harnessed the power of this protocol in its products the first of which is Net.Medic to make these optimizations available to all users of the Internet.

The Need for Monitoring and Improving

To date, Internet performance has been monitored largely by those who provision the Internet—the Internet Service Providers and the operators of the Internet backbone, such as MCI. These vendors, working under extremely competitive conditions, have tools available to them which monitor, in high detail, the activity of the equipment they control. But these tools, such as probes and sniffers, do not diagnose problems outside of the specific domain of the equipment owner. While they are excellent tools for monitoring the portion of the Internet under their control, they don't report on problems upstream or downstream. They are also too expensive to provide to multiple end users, even if they were able to diagnose personal route problems. Other tools, such as "ping" and "traceroute," ii are handy but cumbersome to use and very difficult to interpret. Moreover, Webmasters of the Web sites typically monitor only the health of their own servers, not that of the Internet itself. As a result, users with complaints either get an incomplete report of the contributing sources of their problem, or worse, they get the run-around from vendor to vendor. While this level of service is unthinkable elsewhere in the consumer's experience, because the Internet is new and technical, the Internet user feels both overwhelmed and helpless, a situation he or she wants to change. The agent for educating and empowering the Internet consumer exists within the Internet itself; it simply needs to be unlocked. Through VitalSigns' unique uses of the rich instrumentation capabilities of the lingua franca of the Internet TCP/IP Internet users can diagnose and pinpoint what and where their problems are. In addition, VitalSigns' knowledge engine allows these users to correct a variety of client/server application transmission problems. VitalSigns employs an exhaustive list of client/server monitoring and correction algorithms in its architecture based upon years of research. This architecture is so unique that VitalSigns has a number of patents pending on it. If Internet users have a mechanism for monitoring and documenting their ISP's performance, ISPs can provide proof of various levels of service. Armed with Net.Medic's competitive information, ISPs have a mechanism for provisioning tiered service and pricing levels and billing for them. The users of these tiered services can verify delivery, resulting in higher revenues and improved customer satisfaction for the ISP. The analogous situation holds true for corporate Intranets and the IS groups who manage them. Hence, service-level or application-level monitoring is easily achievable with VitalSigns' technology. The management of the IS group, as well as the users of its services, know how well their service is being delivered, where any problems are, and how to quickly resolve them. Finger-pointing is reduced, efficiency is enhanced and customer satisfaction rises.

The Need for Problem Isolation

Today, when a browser fails to return a page or response time degrades, the user has no understanding of which component in his path caused his problem. Unable to identify the source of the problem, he is frustrated and inefficient in seeking help from others and often blames the wrong party for his troubles. He may cumulatively spend hours with the ISP or PC vendor helpdesk or his corporate IT helpdesk, wasting his time and theirs. VitalSigns's Net.Medic software can isolate the source of the problem and apply the appropriate algorithm to fix the problem automatically where possible.iii It can also generate reports which show the location and frequency of these problems. In the Internet, Net.Medic can isolate problems to segments within clear points of demarcation, such as the demarcation between the ISP and the Internet backbone.iv This informs the user who has ultimate authority over a particular problem and its solution.
Some ISPs have erroneously blamed the Internet backbone for an ISP congestion problem, because their users don't see where the congestion problems occur and ISPs are not, consequently, compelled to fix congestion problems under their control. Similarly, responsive ISPs, who readily fix problems they control, have no mechanism for making fixes or improvements readily apparent to their customers, because some other component in their customers' personal route may degrade overall performance. With Net.Medic, Internet users can cost-effectively isolate problems to a particular segment of their personal route. They can therefore hold their ISPs accountable for ISP-related problems. Hence, a customer-oriented ISP would promptly fix a congestion problem under its control and would be able to tout its customer service track record. Similarly, a user would not spend his precious time with the support hotline of his ISP if he knew that the problems were elsewhere—and not caused by the ISP. In the process, both the user and the ISP would save time and expense.  Net.Medic can also define the demarcation points within the Intranet. Thus, if a corporate-wide IS (Information Systems) group is responsible for the backbone, and a business unit is responsible for its own local area network (LAN), and a systems administrators' group is responsible for desktops or servers, the user can immediately contact the correct organization in the event of a failure that is beyond the reach of Net.Medic's optimization capabilities. 

How Net.Medic Improves User's Experiences 

There are three types of actions Net.Medic takes to correct personal route problems: automatable, manual, and long-term actions. 
  • Immediate, automatable actions are transparent to the user so that he knows his connection is optimized. These actions dynamically tune the personal route for optimal performance in response to real-time, changing conditions, much like microprocessors on high-performance cars change engine and suspension tuning in real-time today. 
  • Manual actions such as certain desktop reconfigurations can be done by the user, and are easily explained and understood by the user. VitalSigns' knowledge engine provides a step-by-step guide in plain language for fixing numerous problems that the user might encounter. 
  • Long-term actions are typically equipment purchases, and are based on the knowledge that the purchase will yield improved performance. Since changes such as switching ISPs or upgrading modems cannot be automated and require action on the part of users, they need sufficient information to feel confident in embarking upon the change. Net.Medic makes recommendations based on exhaustive reporting of problems encountered and their frequency. 

Conclusion

As the Internet and its uses continue to evolve, the need for performance optimization, problem isolation, and service-level monitoring will only grow. Similarly, as corporations further rely on their intranet infrastructure for mission-critical business applications, requirements for performance improvement and measurement will escalate. VitalSigns was founded with the mission of creating an easy-to-use and inexpensive set of tools that empower all constituents of the Internet and Intranets, including users, service providers, equipment vendors and managers. This goal is achieved by unlocking the potential in instrumenting the Internet's own protocol—available for the first time with VitalSigns' Net.Medic.  Net.Medic's ability to perceptibly improve speed, monitor and improve performance, and isolate problems, creates an environment of accountability in which users are likelier to accelerate their use of the Internet and of Intranets. By building on years of research in this field, VitalSigns is committed to providing these tools and helping to achieve the promise of an IT infrastructure that can measurably deliver on its promises—communications, community, and commerce.
 

"What are the main problems with using the Web?"  Speed continues to be the number one problem of Web users (76.55%), and has been since the Fourth Survey when the question was first introduced. This is not to say that problem has been getting worse, as the number who complained of speed is down from 80.9% in the Fifth Survey, but still higher than the 69.9% in the Fourth. This effect is most likely due to the changes in connect speed of users to the Internet. The next big problems are "finding known info" (34.09%), organizing collected information (31.03%), and being able to find pages already visited (13.41%). Cost does not seem to be an issue, with only 7.75% reporting this as a problem. Given that the  average household income of Web users is well above the normal population, this is not very surprising and can not be taken to mean that the Web is currently affordable for all. The only notable difference between genders was the problem of finding information: 31.01% of males, and 40.33% of females reported this problem. This difference was found in the Fifth Survey as well.

 
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i Copyright 1994, 1995, 1996 Georgia Tech Research Corporation. All rights reserved. Source: GVU's WWW User Survey www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/user_surveys. 

ii A UNIX and Windows95/NT command 

iii Clearly, some catastrophic problems—such as the failure of an Internet router or switch—cannot be fixed by the user. 

iv The notion of demarcation has long been part of telecommunications, providing clear lines of responsibility between Interexchange Carriers (IXCs) and Local Exchange Carriers (LECs).
 

© 1997 VitalSigns Software, Inc. VitalSigns, Net.Medic and AutoCure are trademarks of VitalSigns Software, Inc. All other products mentioned are trademarks of their respective owners.